Show HN: Turn Your Blog Into a Downloadable Ebook

https://www.ebookglue.com/

by shantanubala • 14 years ago

36 39 14 years ago

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

Hi! I made this as a side project to play around with Elastic Beanstalk and scalable ebook conversions, and it's now evolved into something a little bigger.

I'd love some feedback, and it's still pretty experimental, so there will be some bugs, but I've got it working for most full-text RSS feeds.

Currently, the interface is very simple: you give it the URL of your blog, RSS, or Atom feed, and it will give you a link you can use to share it. This "share link" contains downloads for ePub and Mobi files, and the downloads will always stay up to date with the latest content (I use Superfeedr to poll the feeds on the backend).

Let me know if you have any questions.

dizzystar3• 14 years ago

I think this is an awesome idea and I'm willing to test it.

How well does it handle image files?

Is there any icons or logos that I can use and do I get a link or something to make it easy for my site readers to grab the files?

EDIT: I can't log in for some reason and I guess I can't get a password reset?

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

It uses Mozilla Persona -- were you able to sign in using your Persona/BrowserID account? (https://login.persona.org/) If you don't already have a Persona account, you should be able to create one using the login dialog itself. If you're still having trouble, let me know.

It fetches all images and inserts them accordingly, so images should be handled appropriately. I haven't figured out a good way to handle video embeds, but I'm looking for a good way to fetch standardized thumbnails in place of videos.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I think it is a cool idea, I suggest you negotiate with a blog owner and create example files from their blog which potential users could see.

What is your business model with respect to the book after it is created? Is it a 'percentage of sales', 'one time fee' ? Your terms document wasn't very clear :-)

And what is your position on someone using the URL/RSS of a blog they haven't written. So lets say someone puts the RSS link for Ars Technica in there, sort an instapaper on steroids, and then downloads the epub, how does that work?

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

Thanks! I'm happy to hear you like it.

I'm still working on the details, but I want to create an easy way for someone to sell their blog's content as an ebook subscription that works on any eReader and isn't locked into a single platform (I'm working on adding PDF output and some more formats soon!). There are two models that are possible: monthly fee, or percentage of sales. I think I can do both -- percentage of sales for people who are just starting out, and a monthly fee for heavy users who want a volume discount on their sales. I apologize if this is a bit vague, but I'm still trying to figure out what will be the most fair and sustainable way to do pricing.

I'm also working on the terms, right now I just prohibit using this for anything illegal, which would include redistributing content you don't own or isn't under the Creative Commons. This is a very nuanced issue: I think it is perfectly fine for someone to use my service for a feed like Ars Technica as long as they don't redistribute the ebooks that I generate for them. In other words, it's fine if you use my service as a "RSS Aggregator for eReaders" if that's your intended use case, but it's not fine if you post up a Mobi file of Ars Technica's content to The Pirate Bay or something like that.

Let me know if you have any questions :-)

m_eiman2• 14 years ago

I've tried using it, but with limited success. First of all I had problem with logging in, probably because I block third party cookies in Firefox. Then I switched to Safari, and got a bit further. I did get logged out when I added a blog URL though, for some reason. Finally, the file generated contains only a small intro of each post, and no images. According to my Wordpress settings, the feed is supposed to contain the full posts.

https://www.ebookglue.com/share/ludvig-och-leija-eiman

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I checked your feed, and it looks like your feed only contains the post summaries. Could you perhaps check your settings again? You can also try directly entering the URL for your feed if you're using a service like Feedburner.

Let me know how it goes, and I'm working on getting an in-house authentication system, but Mozilla Persona was the quickest way to get up and running. I've noticed that it's not as stable as I would have liked it to be.

evolution• 14 years ago

I tried logging in -- persona sent me email of confirmation, when clicked it redirected to ebookglue which alerted 'login attempt failed'. you might want to look into that.

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

I'm sorry about the trouble with Persona -- many people have been reporting issues, and it's unfortunately not been as stable as I would have wanted it to be. I'm looking into whether it's my own implementation (though I followed all the recommended best practices quite closely), or an issue with Persona itself.

EDIT: It's a known issue with Persona and third party cookies: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/1352

Unfortunately, this is a situation where a lot of people on HN probably disable third party cookies (though perhaps a larger percentage of HN readers already have Persona accounts?). Anyway, I'm looking into rolling out my own authentication with email/password soon.

rogerbinns2• 14 years ago

I'd like to try it without logging in at all. The first question everyone will have is if it works on their own site or a site they are familiar with and to see the results. Having to create accounts/login just impedes that process.

akkyakimoto• 14 years ago

It is an interesting service. I tried to ebook-ify my (Japanese) blog but noticed the contents body are all garbled. https://www.ebookglue.com/share/Qiu-Yuan-saibouzurabopurogur...

The index are fine so there might be some missing or mistake of encoding notation around the body part.

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I looked at the resulting ebooks, and it looks fine, but it may be a character encoding issue that is specific to your ePub or Mobipocket viewer or reader -- which device or software are you using? I'll look into fixing it.

ig1• 14 years ago

The problem with all of these services doing Blog RSS -> ebook is that the RSS feed typically only has the last 20 items and doesn't include comments, hence the value is relatively limited.

Given almost all blogs run on a handful of services (i.e Wordpress) it probably wouldn't be hard to make custom scrapers that capture everything.

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

Yup! That's the next step that I'm working on right now :-) I've gotten in touch with the folks at Readability, and will be implementing their content parser soon.

I'm looking to create an easy way for bloggers to publish their content for ebook readers without having to lock themselves into DRM schemes like the Kindle publishing platform, so this is targeted at the bloggers themselves primarily.

Turing_Machine2• 14 years ago

"RSS feed typically only has the last 20 items"

In Wordpress, at least, this is an easy configuration change. In Blogger, you can just add ?max-results=500 (or whatever) to the feed URI to get as many as you want.

pseingatl2• 14 years ago

Adding this to the ebookglue URL yields the same result, only 20 entries.

mikecane2• 14 years ago

I was going to try it, stopped at the Persona (who?) log in. I'm not going to create Yet Another Damn Account I have to remember the password to. Then I read here that it's based on RSS, and that kills it for me altogether. BTW, I've tried other blog->book services and they usually choke to death on my blogs. This one probably would too. Next!

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Did you expect that you would be able to use it without an account? That's not really a reasonable expectation, at this day and age.

If not, why did you balk at creating an account with a centralized provider that lets you log into multiple websites with the same account, claiming you don't want "Yet Another Damn Account"?

Hell, I logged in just because it supported Persona and I already have an account there (and love it).

mikecane2• 14 years ago

>>>I already have an account there

Good for you. I would have tried it if I could have logged in with Twitter or my WordPress account.

shantanubala16• 14 years ago

The site is down. Unfortunately the "yellow" status of AWS elastic load balancers in my region have affected this as well -- I'm working to get it up and running in a different region, but I'm also waiting on a response from Amazon.

pseingatl2• 14 years ago

Internal server errors.

Show HN: Turn Your Blog Into a Downloadable Ebook

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